Question

Until now there is no good article that specifies what standards a programmer should follow in order to build global website! and that is why am here, where I hope to find good guidance.

please help me in the following issues:

• what data types should I use for multilingual website? for example user field could be in English, Dutch or Arabic.. should I define it as varchar with utf8_unicode_ci collation, would that do the trick? I found articles saying to use nvarchar, which is not there in phpmyadmin data type selection! or should I define it manually in command line

• What are the preferred lengths for Username, Url and Email fields?

• If I want to show date and time in my content, should I use timestamp or Datetime?

• what approach is preferred for implementing multilingual website? shall I translate content and place it in database table or just create different contents pages and call them when it’s corresponded language is chosen? after all only website menu will change I don’t see a good reason for keeping it in database.

Sorry for long writing. I hope you could help me in this matter because I am willing to build a heavy website using php and mysql and I don’t want to start with wrong approach and get bugs and errors in the end.

Regards

Answer 1

Comments to Your points:

• single UTF-8 collation should do the trick for many languages but still You could have problems with arabic, russian, cyrillic, japan and chinese languages (input).
• there is no preferred lengths, it is just upon You. I use 50 chars for usernames, 500 chars for URLs and 250 chars for email addresses. But You also may let the user to choose a username with length of 300 characters – again, it is just upon You
• this has nothing to do with multilinguality and (somebody may suppose I am repeating mysels, but) it is upon Your preferrence
• not only the menu will change, You should also keep translated URLs with a mark which language is selected right away, thus the About Us page should be
  • http://mysite.com/en/about-us/ in english
  • http://mysite.com/de/uber-uns/ in german
  • http://mysite.com/fr/a-propos-de-nous/ in french, etc
    therefore it is easier to keep the translated documents in a tree document structure where the homepage is on the top, /en/, /de/, /fr/ folders and the content beneath but this leads to more difficult content administration. When saving the translated contents into a DB somebody may find switching between languages and following the previous URL to open up the right translated content with appropriate translated URL not quite easy, too.

Conclusion: there is no preferred way of doing this and that when speaking of multilingual website – and that’s the reason why there are no articles about the topic. Mostly it is about the CMS You are using and if You are writing one for Yourself it is only upon Your preferrences.